Gregory Erickson

Gregory Erickson has taught at the Gallatin School since 2004, specializing in courses on modern literature, popular culture, religion, and music including “Writing Twentieth-Century Music and Culture;” “Beyond Language: The Surreal, the Mystical, and the Monstrous;” and “Contexts of Musical Meaning.” He is the author of The Absence of God in Modernist Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and the coauthor, with Richard Santana, of Religion and Popular Culture: Rescripting the Sacred (McFarland, 2008). He has also published in journals such as the Henry James Review and the Journal of Popular Music Studies and in several scholarly collections of essays on television. Erickson is trained as a literary scholar and as a classical musician and performs regularly with professional orchestras and chamber ensembles. He is currently working on a book on heresy and the modern literary imagination.

Teaching and Research Interests

20th-century American and European literature; James Joyce; religion and literature; 20th-century music; music and literature; postmodernism; cultural studies; television studies

Recent News

Professor Erickson received a 2015-2016 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. The award was established in 2009 to recognize educators for their outstanding teaching; their ability to inspire students; a pedagogical approach that is creative and rigorous; expert advising and mentoring skills; and contributions to their field.

Professor Erickson will present the paper “Alternate Reformations: Finnegans Wake and Religious Iconoclasm” at the International James Joyce Symposium, which will be held in London, UK, in June 2016.

Professor Erickson will present the paper “Questioning Body and Blood in True Blood and The Leftovers: HBO and the Heretical Imperative” the 2016 International Society of Heresy Studies conference, which will be held in New York, New York, in June 2016.

Professor Erickson will present the paper “New Paradigms of Academic Writing: Fan/Critic/Student/Academic” at the Fan Studies Network conference, which will be held in Norwich, UK, in June 2016.

Professor Erickson presented “‘The Time Lord’s Body is a Miracle’: Exploring Religious Spaces in Doctor Who” at the Popular Culture Association Conference, which was held in Seattle, Washington, in March 2016.

Along with Scott Korb, Professor Erickson organized the David Foster Wallace and Ethics conference at Gallatin, held in April 2015. Professor Erickson was the organizer and leader of the seminar: Modernism and Religion: New Theoretical Approaches at the Modernist Studies Conference in Pittsburgh, November 6, 2014. He was awarded a grant to participate in a faculty seminar this spring on the “Afterlife of the Reformation” at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.

His work “Old Heresies and Future Paradigms: Joss Whedon on Body and Soul” was included in The Joss Whedon Reader, eds. Rhonda Wilcox, et al. (Syracuse University Press, 2014). Professor Erickson presented his paper “Constructing History, Heresy, and the Sacred in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the Book of Mormon” at the 2014 AAR Eastern International Regional Conference, organized by the American Academy of Religion, which will take place May 2-4, 2014 at Syracuse University.

Professor Erickson received a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant to participate in a faculty seminar on “Arts, Architecture, and Devotional Interaction in England, 1200–1600” in York, England, for the summer of 2014. Along with Bernard Schweizer, Professor Erickson organized the International Society for Heresy Studies’s inaugural conference on the topic of heresy and/in literature, held at Gallatin May 30-31, 2014.